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X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

disruptionist.com

671–680 of 834 posts

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#671
post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in the absence of credible information to the contrary, it's not wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... when a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view

Is the useSkin parameter something you manually added? I am not logged in and when I navigate to another page the parameter (and with it the skin preference) disappears.

Oh sorry, yes I have a browser extension that always adds that parameter to any wikipedia page. I usually strip it when posting a link, but I forgot (and since it's a long link, it doesn't display in its entirety so I didn't catch it).

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Seems reductive.

It's a thought terminating cliche.

Systems thinking is much more nuanced and productive IMO. Drift Into Failure by Sidney Dekker is a good introduction.

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#673
post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are links to mastodon still banned on twitter? Because that was a thing after Musk took over. So much for being a free speech absolutist. You're making the mistake of taking a (communal + antagonistic) narcissist at face value. They are known to lie to suit their current goals and when those goals are achieved, they will lie to suit their new goals, whether the lies are congruent with each other or not. This is a guy…

If Elon Musk really as narcissistic as you paint him, he would definitely take credit for these bans, or at least comment on them. A narcissist wants to be the center of attention, by definition, and you are actually playing his game here. A "legitimate f-up" is the worst for a narcissist, as it would show he is nothing special, and incompetent. That's why I go with the "legitimate f-up" explanation. There is no clea…

> If Elon Musk really as narcissistic as you paint him, he would definitely take credit for these bans, or at least comment on them.

That's like saying a liar will always lie. Real people do not have min-maxed traits, he has obviously non-zero self-control. If it's an action that benefits him in some way but knows will alienate his followers, he is perfectly capable of doing it in secret.

> A narcissist wants to be the center of attention, by definition

Definition of which subtype?

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I never said it was a masterplan or his personal decision. Culture comes from the top (only people with very strong principles will resist and many most likely quit when he took over). All he needed to do is make visible his displeasure at (free) competitors in front of the right people.

He AFAIK also tweeted about not allowing free promotion for mastodon. Which again speaks volumes about how much he values freedom of speech. If a free (as in speech and beer) and decentralized platform can be a credible competitor to twitter - serve the same amount of users but be self repairing and resistant to takeovers - than that would be a win, even if his company would no longer be needed.

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If you take anything from this discussion, please at least look up different types of narcissism. Far too often people reduce them all to the "standard" overt archetype (usually even an overdone caricature of it) and it's hard for victims of other subtypes to convince others what they are dealing with.

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to look up under whose presidency it was when the United States Justice Department sued Microsoft in 1998. :) Musk was far, far less political (at least regarding his public persona) even 10 years ago; his persona was more heavily futurism oriented. Electric cars to help mitigate climate change, colonizing Mars, that kind of stuff. It wasn't really a "liberal" or "conservative" thing then. Would've been…

But this is exactly my point and you don't even realize it, you think a billionaire helping mitigate climate change or colonizing Mars is a good thing and not political. You don't realize that what you described is exactly what I mean by "liberal oligarchy". You don't mind if a billionaire is "helping" humanity. What I'm saying is that a billionaire doing anything grand like that AT ALL, IS oligarchy, it is not the b…

Clarification: I am guessing you are using the liberal term from a "classic liberalism" sense (e.g. how it is used in Europe) and not the US version of the term, which generally refers to social liberalism and is often associated with Democrats? That changes some things.

Personally I would absolutely love it if humanity didn't have to rely on billionaire philanthropy for these sort of things. But you are talking about a significant paradigm shift in world politics, one of which unfortunately (from my perspective) much of the world is moving away from at the moment.

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#675
post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the people he banned for criticizing him say otherwise.

People keep saying this yet there are countless people on X critisizing Musk freely, so it must be fine to criticise Musk on X. I can provide examples and already have done. Can you?

If I pretend to be fine with people criticizing me, that claims fails as soon as I block/ban/throttle one (1) person for doing that.

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#676
post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

"The purpose of a system is what it does." This is only true for systems that works perfectly. If the implementation if flawed, the system can do something different from its purpose. Claiming "The purpose of a system is what it does." is like claiming that software bugs do not exist.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" is a shorthand statement that comes out of the study of complex, human-involved, systems that lack unitary design, often having many actors having a hand in creating over time, and mostly is a statement about the lack of analytical utility of any other concept of the purpose of a system, and it is about analyzing the operation of those systems over a window of time. A longer phrase from the person who coined it on the same topic and explaining it is, “There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”

> Claiming "The purpose of a system is what it does." is like claiming that software bugs do not exist.

It's more like claiming that there is no meaningful difference to any outside observer between a bug that is not eradicated over an extended time window and an intentional feature.

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 may 1875 is the reference date of ISO 8601:2004. You don't need to trust me on that, you can just go check the standard. Or you can claim that it's misinformation too. Up to you.

Wouldn't you pause for a moment to consider how a 2004 standard is relevant to a COBOL codebase that is probably more than 50 years old at this point?

I'm not sure everything in there is 50 years old. Not even that everything is actually in COBOL. Those gigantic beasts tend to eventually be quarantined into some VM, never touched again, and then somebody puts some modern-ish wrappers around. For example some HTTP JSON API endpoints to query things. And what do they do when a date is missing? Not returning one would surely make sense. But I'd also expect layers and layers of abstractions in between, maybe some libs to transform some data type in one representation into another. Somewhere on the way, this date as a default value could easily slip in. It's not entirely made up, it's in an ISO standard. Maybe the lib was strictly following that standard.

It's not hard to imagine that something like this actually happened. Dismissing it outright just because COBOL does not have a datetime data type and the standard is only 21 years old (that far pre-dates node.js btw) could be playing into the hands of the Muskians who surely love any possibility to get out of this BS in case they made a mistake. Would not be the first they made nor the first they handled that way.

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#678
post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reductive.

But in the absence of credible information to the contrary, it's not wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... when a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view

> But in the absence of credible information to the contrary, it's not wrong.

In the sense it is intended, it is entirely correct. It is not a claim about what the intent of the people involved in the system is, it is a recognition that (1) intent doesn't really aggregate, and, more importantly, even if it did (2) intent that consistently fails, because of the nature of the system, to materialize into function doesn't matter.

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#679
post #64

Particularly ironic given that DOGE is reported to be using Signal as its comms platform. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579873

Elon personally uses Signal, I would assume this is a legitimate mistake which will be fixed soon if it hasn't already

I can’t edit the original comment but it looks like sharing signal links is back, but some now have a spam warning. https://x.com/jeremiahdjohns/status/1891554583756845526?s=46

Re: X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links

#680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reductive.

It's a thought terminating cliche. Systems thinking is much more nuanced and productive IMO. Drift Into Failure by Sidney Dekker is a good introduction.

> It's a thought terminating cliche.

It's the opposite; it's a heuristic for directing thought down useful pathways and escaping a rabbit hole of speculation on matters which makes no material difference, and which largely (for the kinds of systems it concerns) also involve pointless metaphysical wankery on the order of debating how many angels can dance on the head of the pin, because the kinds of systems it concerns (which are almost all real systems that matter) aren't guided by unitary intent, and pretty much any intent you want to appply probably can be found in some subset (and, conversely, also opposed by some subset) of the contributors to the system.

A more precise statement might be "'Purpose' is not a meaningful attribute of complex systems," but POSIWID works.

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